Tag: Chatter Limits

As a Salesforce Administrator in charge of building processes and maintaining a Salesforce platform one of the most important things we have to keep in mind is Process limits and Chatter limits. I will be honest I have never given limits much thought as an Administrator it is one of those things that never crossed my mind. It fell into a category of “out of sight out of mind”. Even now I think I unconsciously assumed my Developer would handle it. I think of Process Limits in the context of apex limits, API call out limits etc. Since I have been using Lightning Process Builder it is one of those topics that have crept up into my line of vision. I realize now it is just as important for an Administrator to be aware of Process Limits as it is for a Developer.

Out of the box there are set limits which are per organization limits. Salesforce has plenty of resources and documentation explaining any and all limits (check some out here: Process Limits). These limits go hand in hand with daily email limits, apex governor limits and SOQL query limits. These limitations were placed for a reason of course. The more processes and limits you reach the slower your organization may run. Since businesses prefer instant gratification you may want to keep your limits in mind. With that said there are some limits that are just inherently too low such as the Chatter follow limit of 500 follows across all objects.

This became a problem for my company because we are shifting our business goals to be more Sales focused. So this limitation wasn’t just a problem for us but would impact any B2B business and those who are Sales driven. If you have Sales teams that are nurturing relationships whether individually at the Contact level or organization wide at the Account level they will be limited on the records they can follow from Accounts, Contacts to Opportunities. Chatter unfollow rules can help mitigate this being a problem initially but 500 records across all objects is really low.

This is one of those really easy limits to have increased. Salesforce Support will increase your Chatter limit once your Administrator submits a case giving a fairly simple business reason. We were able to increase our Chatter limit from 500 to 2000 by simply saying we needed the increase for our Sales teams to nurture Business Relationships. We were able to get this request approved in a matter of hours. I think it was the simplest and fastest Support case I have ever submitted.

Of course this is not the only Salesforce limit you can request an increase for. Process Limits, depending on how complex you have built your organization, can also be increased. As noted in the link above Process Limits start at 50 rules or processes per object. Granted this didn’t initially seem like a high number until you realize it is per object. So this in and of itself is a pretty high limit. But in an instance where you find yourself creeping your way towards the 50 limit for a particular object you can request a limit increase. According to my Executive Account manager Salesforce tries not to go higher than 300 per object here. As with any computer, IOS or even your cell phone the more applications and processes you have running at the same time the lower your performance will be. With that being said don’t let yourself feel that you are held to the initial limits Salesforce has set up, anything can be changed to suit your particular business need all you have to do is ask!